Article COMPARISON OF A NOVEL ORGANIC-FLUID THERMOFLUIDIC HEAT CONVERTER AND AN ORGANIC RANKINE CYCLE HEAT ENGINE§ Christoph J.W. Kirmse, Oyeniyi A. Oyewunmi, Andrew J. Haslam and Christos N. Markides* Clean Energy Processes (CEP) Laboratory, Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, U.K. * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +44 (0)20 759 41601 § This paper is an extended version of our paper published in Proceedings of 3rd International Seminar on ORC Power Systems, Brussels, Belgium, 12–14 October 2015. Academic Editor: name Version May 27, 2016 submitted to Energies; Typeset by LATEX using class file mdpi.cls 1 Abstract: The Up-THERM heat converter is an unsteady, two-phase thermofluidic oscillator that 2 employs an organic working-fluid, which is currently being considered as a prime-mover in small- 3 to medium-scale combined heat and power (CHP) applications. In this paper, the Up-THERM heat 4 converter is compared to a basic (sub-critical, non-regenerative) equivalent organic Rankine cycle 5 (ORC) heat engine with respect to power output, thermal efficiency and exergy efficiency, but also 6 capital cost and specific cost. The study focuses on a pre-specified Up-THERM design in a selected 7 application, a heat-source temperature range from 210 °C to 500 °C and five different working 8 fluids (three n-alkanes and two refrigerants). A modelling methodology is developed that allows 9 the above technoeconomic performance indicators to be estimated for the two thermodynamic 10 power-generation systems. It is found that the power output of the ORC engine is generally higher 11 than that of the Up-THERM heat converter, at least as envisioned and in the chosen application, 12 as expected.